Our Complaints Policy

We are committed to providing a high quality legal service to all our clients. When something goes wrong we need you to tell us about it. This will enable us to help you and to improve our standards.

To assist in defining the process to be followed, we use the following definitions:-

Formal Complaint

is a ‘formal’ complaint from a client made to the Senior Partner (either directly by the client or via the Legal Ombudsman (Office for Legal Complaints) (LeO)) and must be dealt with in accordance with SRA procedures. The Complaints Partner shall ensure that full cooperation is provided in such instances.

Dissatisfaction

is any other substantive expression of dissatisfaction (oral or written) regarding the practice’s services or of its personnel in the conduct of their duties or any request to speak to someone’s Supervisor. Such dissatisfaction may indicate potential for improvement in the practice’s processes and will be dealt with informally via ‘in-house’ procedures.

Loss of Client

even where no formal complaint or other form of dissatisfaction is expressed, the practice will attempt to identify reasons for clients instructing other firms.

Our complaints procedure

1. If you have a complaint, please first contact the fee earner dealing with your case. If you are not satisfied within 14 days submit the details of your complaint in writing to that fee earner if you have not already done so.

Upon receipt of a written complaint this will be referred to the fee earner dealing with your matter and a copy will be given to our client care partner (currently Mr G Bennett at our Uxbridge Office). We will acknowledge receipt of your complaint within 2 working days. If the complaint concerns the client care partner a copy will be given to another partner at the Uxbridge Office whose name will be provided to you. The complaint will be entered in our Central Register.

We will then investigate your complaint. If we require further information we will let you know within 14 days of receiving your complaint. We may request you to attend a meeting to discuss your complaint. In any event we shall endeavour to give a full reply within 21 days of having sufficient information from you.

If you are unable to resolve your complaint with our fee earner or receive no reply your next step is to write direct to our client care partner (or in the case of a complaint against him or her to the alternative partner notified or any other partner in the absence of notification) asking him or her to investigate your complaint.

Your complaint will then be reviewed again and you may expect either a request to attend a meeting to discuss your complaint or a full reply within 21 days of receipt of your request.

At this stage, if you are still not satisfied you can write to the client care partner again. We will then arrange to review our decision. This will happen within 21 days.

You should allow us up to 8 weeks to resolve your complaint. If, after 8 weeks, we have failed to deal with your complaint to your satisfaction, you can involve the Legal Ombudsman.

If you are not happy with our final response, you have up to 6 months to bring your complaint to the Legal Ombudsman. The Legal Ombudsman will accept complaints up to 6 years from the date of the actual omission of which you are complaining about, or 3 years from the date when you should have known about the complaint. This only applies to problems which have happened on or after 6th October 2010. If the problem happened earlier than that, you must not have been aware of it before 6th October 2010.